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Spotsy
on the Spot
Creating
transportation-efficient development in
Spotsylvania County is like turning around the
proverbial cruise ship. County leaders are doing
many of the right things but it will be years
before they see results.
by
Robert L. Burke
For
years Spotsylvania County, one of the
fastest-growing localities in Virginia, has been
racing into an uncertain future without a map.
Literally. The county has no land-use map to show where new development
should go and what form
that development should be.
A
land use map is indispensable to any respectable
comprehensive plan. But Spotsylvania doesn’t
have one, relying instead upon the broad
guidelines of zoning ordinances to guide planning
decisions.
Without
a land-use map, “what do you measure a rezoning
against?” asks Ric Goss, the county’s planning
director, who arrived in May 2003 after the
current comprehensive plan was already written.
“If you don’t have a land-use plan that tells
you where you want to go, how do you make these
decisions?”
The
lack of a map symbolizes the confused, even
aimless, approach that Spotsylvania took towards
growth in years past -- and taxpayers are
paying the price. A year ago Spotsylvania voters
approved a $144 million bond referendum to fix a
handful of congested secondary roads. But as Bacon's
Rebellion found in a previous report ("Spotsy
Turvy," Sept. 8, 2006.), the county is
playing catch-up. Meanwhile, a conveyer belt of
traffic-inefficient development projects,
resulting from zoning decisions made years ago,
threatens to dump more traffic on the roads,
making congestion worse before it gets better.
But
it would be unfair to characterize the county as
conducting Business as Usual. County leaders hope
to tame the sprawling, automobile-dependent
pattern of development. And maps are integral to the effort.
In the past year
or so, dozens of county residents have helped
draft new land-use plans in their voting districts
– often emphasizing denser, mixed-use
development - that will shape a new
comprehensive plan. County planners are drafting
guidelines for protecting open space and historic
sites, improving the look of new commercial
development and ensuring affordable housing.
Many
of the new initiatives, such as encouraging infill
development and attracting new employers, could ease the strain on overloaded local roads. “I
feel comfortable that even though [the debate]
will be quite heated, at the end of the day
we’ll have a better product,” says Henry
“Hap” Connors Jr., chairman of the Board of
Supervisors.
It remains an open
question whether Spotsylvania, like other
fast-growing localities in Virginia, can move fast
enough. The population here rose 29 percent
between 2000 and 2005, and is predicted to rise
another 49 percent by 2025 to more than 181,000
people. The land-use proposals are
working their way through the system and many
won’t get to the board of supervisors until next
year.
What’s more, in many ways the
deck is stacked against the county. Regional
planning is weak, there is virtually no support
from the state, and there’s the challenge of
building political consensus among new and old
residents, the business sector, and other
constituencies affected by growth.
Whatever the comprehensive plan that emerges from
that debate, it will certainly be less than what
Goss and others think is needed. “If we can come
out with 50 to 75 percent of what we went in
with, I’ll feel that this is a success,” he
says.
Under the draft proposals for
the county, most of the planned growth will occur
close to Interstate 95, which bisects the county,
and the city of Fredericksburg to the east.
That’s not a big change from the current plan.
But Goss says the new proposals would redevelop of some of the
badly developed areas, and change the look of
development. “When you talk to people around here, they hate
growth, and if you ask them why, [they say]
‘It’s ugly, it doesn’t pay for itself, and
I’ve got to put up with the smell and
noise,’” he says.
Connors says a
big change is the linking of land use and
transportation. The new comprehensive plan will be
based on that connection, he says - unlike the
current plan, which bases growth plans on the
placement of water and sewer lines. The shift is
driven by hard facts – the state isn’t
building roads as fast as the localities want,
which means “we’re having to pay attention to
land use and transportation,” Connors
says.
Another major step is the
drafting of “level of service standards,”
which will set the bar for a wide range of
infrastructure needs, such as roads, public
safety, schools. Goss wonders how the county has
gotten by without such standards. How, he asks,
could it measure the impact of a new project
without defining what the minimum standards are?
If the board approves the proposed standards,
“then I think we’ve got the mechanisms” for
managing growth, he says.
In
transportation, the standards would require
traffic-impact studies for many new developments,
encourage the use of transit, especially for new
large-scale residential projects, and promote
connecting transit facilities with surrounding
neighborhoods through bike trails and sidewalks.
The standards would encourage clustered mixed-use
development, with the goal of giving residents an option
to their cars.
Connors also hopes the county board will
eventually agree to support the Virginia Railway
Express commuter trains, which now reach only as
far south as Fredericksburg. If the county joins,
it would be able to raise revenues to fund
transportation projects, and could attracted
transit-oriented, mixed-use developments at future
VRE stations, he says. That could help attract
major employers. “We may have the opportunity
to have some reverse commutes and bring some jobs
into Spotsylvania County over the next several
years,” he says.
In addition,
Spotsylvania revised its proffer guidelines this
summer for rezonings for single-family houses,
townhouses and apartments, raising the amounts
between 59 percent and 280 percent, depending on
the project. Proffers for a single-family house
rezoning now exceed $35,000. The county also is considering charging impact fees for new
development, which would squeeze money for
infrastructure even from by-right developments
that didn’t require rezonings.
County voters approved the $144 million bonds-for-roads
referendum by a broad majority -- 61 percent voted
in favor. That margin of approval will be tough to
match in the debate over the comprehensive
plan.
Catherine Farley, head of
Spotsylvania Voters to Stop Sprawl, says voters
can easily support new roads, but higher-density
development is a tougher sell, because it implies
even more people. “People think the [traffic]
congestion problem can be ‘fixed’ and it
can’t be,” she says. “People figure another
lane will help, right? But it doesn’t work that
way.”
Farley and others say
the necessity of educating county residents is a big hurdle to
forming any public consensus.
Kevin
Leahy, a planning commission member, says avoiding
future traffic problems means changing land-use
patterns today. “Right now we don’t understand
that,” he says. “We continue to do commercial
development here, residential development there,
and never the two shall meet. Until you get people
to understand what mixed-use means, I don’t know
how you’re going to get out of the
problem.”
Leahy grew up in Prince
William County 20 years ago and says that county
today is trying to fix mistakes it made then.
“Why don’t we just get smart now and try to
fix the problem?" he says. "Because the
way it’s going, it’s just going to get
worse.”
One
seemingly sure thing is that a
majority of county residents don’t like how the
county handles growth. A survey last year showed
only 35 percent are satisfied with the rate of
growth, and just 37 percent are satisfied with how
the county plans for development.
But
there isn't even consensus on whether that survey is
valid. Supervisor Emmitt Marshall, now
in his 27th year on the board representing the
rural southern part of the county, says he’s
never talked to anyone who answered the survey,
“So I don’t know how accurate the surveys
are,” he says.
Another hurdle, says
Goss, is the lack of state support. In Florida,
where he worked 18 years for the city of Largos,
the state did a fiscal-impact model that
localities could use free to help predict the
effect of new development. The state’s
transportation department gave out free software
for planning, he says. “Here, none of that.
There’s no policy guidance, no state plan, and
certainly no regional planning. It’s kind of
like a free for all.”
Without state
or regional help, observes Stewart Schwartz,
director of the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition
for Smarter Growth, it’s easy for county-level
planning staff to be overwhelmed. The same is true for
county residents, many of whom spent long hours
commuting home in the evenings, not attending
county meetings.
“By the time the
comprehensive plan gets done, the public gets
exhausted, but the real [work] comes after that”
in detailed changes of zoning ordinances and other
locally written rules, Schwartz says. “We
[should] fund much more effective planning and
training and comprehensive planning processes for
our counties.”
Connors, though, is
optimistic that the next few months will see
change. He’s enthusiastic about Goss’s efforts
and the proposals the board of supervisors will
debate soon. He’s hopeful too, that the county
will soon join the Virginia Railway Express and
start attracting new transit-oriented
development.
“The irony here is that
the people complaining about these changes are the
same people that promoted the hyper-growth in the
1980s and 1990s,” Connors says. “It’s often
hard to change old ways, but I truly believe
there’s a new majority in Spotsylvania County
and those people want the things we’re trying to
push.”
--
November 1, 2006
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